


The Invisible

by mala_ptica



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Charles You Will Be Drunk, Gay in the 1950s, Gen, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:42:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mala_ptica/pseuds/mala_ptica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his position as a tutor for Pembroke College in the early 1950s, wounded World War II vet Laurie Odell lives a charmed life - but he carries a secret.  Laurie is in a clandestine relationship with another man, a relationship which gives him contentment and happiness of which he'd never dreamed, yet whose exposure, in the current political and social climate, would spell disaster for both of them.  His darkest fears are aroused when his young pupil, Charles Xavier, begins to take an interest in the young professor.  No knowledge of Mary Renault, or X-Men, needed, but helpful, for sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Invisible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [motleystitches (furius)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furius/gifts).



> thank you to PragmaticHominid for beta! <3  
> also, this is set after the ending of The Charioteer, and contains MAJOR MASSIVE spoilers for that.

In retrospect, Laurie Odell was glad that Ralph had threatened to kill him, if he didn't take the job with Pembroke College. It was good, challenging work, and he found himself a bit of a favorite among the girls, and some of the boys – though most will never admit to it, even to themselves. He’s the beautiful, tragically wounded war hero, the white knight of legend, old enough to have authority, but young enough that his students could identify with him. He has many students over the years, and though all instructors like to say they remember each of their students, he doesn’t, but Charles...yes, he remembers Charles. The prodigious Mr. Charles Francis Xavier, Francis, as his peers - and eventually, everyone else - called him, was a half-American reader in philosophy, and Laurie gave him his first tutorial. The boy was a bit of a lush, truth be told, but no more than the average first-year. Francis, was the sort of pupil who honestly, wouldn’t have caught much more of his attention, except for the essential sadness within him – blink and you miss it, but it was there, and it affected Laurie more than he expected. Perhaps he saw some of himself in the child, the unhappy step-son who shuddered at the name of his step-father, perhaps it was the sister he couldn’t figure out, and why she had come all the way to England to watch her older brother go up, but didn’t bother applying herself (or hadn’t been accepted). Whatever it was, he didn't want to spend too much time on him at first, beyond what pity for youth would allow.

What mattered most to Laurie was always the moment at the end of the day, after his final tutorial, when he could put his books back in their homes. He'd wait for Ralph to meet him at the staircase door, bundle him in a jacket, and whisk him back to their flat. That was what he lived for, the joy of belonging, of being loved; he hadn't expected happiness to settle in so smoothly in their lives, like a groove in a bone. If any of the other teachers ask, he lets them have a war story, of soldiers who lost everything and came to rely on each other, and that satisfies most. It’s the students he has to worry about, the bright-eyed dreamers who haven’t lost their sense of romanticism, for whom a story of retreat, of rescue and chance meetings holds more in common with Shakespeare, and Laurie with Juliet, than with mere friendship.

He is no Juliet. For one thing, his knee wouldn't support him crawling around for all those balcony escapades.

The fellows and the students each have it half right.

Then there was Charles Francis, the one student he feared might give it all away, whose perceptions were just sharp enough to cut, but not to reach the heart. Francis lacked that clear sense of social boundaries that one needed to survive; he'd asked, once, about Dunkirk, and Laurie had been happy to oblige, until it turned out that Francis knew more than Laurie had told him. He'd shut the young man down with a retort about snooping, but the incident had left him shaken.

Laurie mostly didn’t mind the tutorials, for the man was gifted, after all, and there was nothing worse than a boring tutorial, with a pupil afraid to ask questions. What Laurie dreaded were the 'accidental' meetings afterwards on the quad, the library run-ins, the garden ambushes. He'd even started avoiding certain pubs, fearing to find a certain pair of baby blues trailing him from beneath long dark lashes. The young man's schoolboy crush on him was not unique, but Francis could not stand to be ignored, even when he knew that the object of his affection was otherwise engaged, and so he pursued Laurie for a bit like a sad puppy, with his baby sister picking up the pieces of his broken heart along the way. Laurie had endured it to a point, but when Francis had greeted him outside his front door, shirt unbuttoned and lips done in rouge, Laurie had needed to put a stop to it, and harshly, with words he never wished to use on a student, and hoped to never again.

He hadn’t seen much of Francis after that, and didn’t think anything of it, except a small twinge of guilt that maybe he had been a bit cruel. Relief at being left alone, however, had eclipsed the sense of guilt so entirely, it was almost an afterthought. But Francis had not been short of friends, and Laurie wasn't going to take any more interest than was seemly.

It wasn’t until a few years later, Laurie learned the real reason behind Francis's absence. Laurie had been ducking out from some awful guest-lecturer on the Isis canals (Ralph might like it, he thinks, but then, Ralph's a sailor), and took a walk in grounds of Worcester college. His bad knee started to cramp, and he took a rest on a tree overlooking the lake. Melancholy washed over him, briefly, as he thought of another garden, long ago, and wondered what had happened to his companion, then. Had the bombs gotten him, or...

“We don’t gain much by reflection,” a young man spoke behind him, and rattled him from his thoughts. He turned, and there was young Francis, looking just the same as he had a few years ago, but in newer styles, and with a different sort of sadness in his eyes.

“So what, charge on, full speed ahead?” Laurie replied warmly, and smiled. What had happened between them years ago should be forgotten, at least, he hoped it had been.

“No,” Francis moved forward, hands in pockets, “I mean, what we haven’t already discerned through experience, will not be revealed to us by thought, but by further experience.”

“You’ve grown opinions,” Laurie cocked a brow, uncertain if this were hostility, or warmth, he was receiving. He was trapped between the ground and the water; it made him wary. He stepped away from the tree trunk, and used his cane for support.

At this comment, Francis laughed, that dear schoolboy laugh that everyone who knew him remembered, and some of his sadness left with it.

“Have you no idea where I’ve been?” Francis asked, smiling, but petulant.

“I thought, really, I’d hoped it was just the Rad,” Laurie teased. Everyone who knew Francis knew the natural sciences were for him, not literature or any of the soft sciences, like Laurie taught. It was a safe bet. He suspected worse, from the question.

The younger man’s smile crooked. “Seoul, mostly, Inchon as well - though I wish you were right," Francis kicked at a protruding root in the ground. "Raven was a mess while I was gone. I was too, before I shipped out - sorry for that.”

The knowledge twisted in Laurie's gut, and though he wished, he didn’t have the heart to ask if it were a joke, oh, hell, please let it be a joke. He wished with the vanity of old men that the wars of their youth would not be revisited on the next generation, that the wars they had fought were so great, so extraordinary and painful that they would end all thought of conflict, forever. For a moment, Francis was not standing there, but poor, dead Bim, and no wonder Francis had been so carefree, so dismissive and persistent, when he wasn’t carefree at all, he was seeking distraction, or worse, connection with an adult who had been through war, who had been scarred by it, and survived. And Laurie had hoped it was just the usual stupidity of young men, but Laurie hadn’t exactly had a normal young adulthood. None of the men and women of his class had. Maybe he didn’t know what normal looked like, except not like himself.  
“Let’s get a drink,” Laurie said, at long last.

And Francis, from his impossibly long lashes, looked up, "I'd like that very much."

**Author's Note:**

> NOTES  
> *** there is absolutely no way Charles’s school friends let him get away with the middle name of Francis  
> *** [this](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcoug6QR9D1qzk79io1_500.jpg) is the tree Laurie leans against.


End file.
